It is Monday, the first full day in my week-long visit to Dad’s place down in Chattanooga, to his comfortable house in the suburbs (more properly in Ringgold, just over the Georgia state line) he shares with Sheryl, his lovely wife of many years. These travel plans have been in the works since way back in the fall; Sheryl and her two daughters who straddle me in age, only just, have gone on a cruise they planned some time ago. Let me come and hang with you while they’re away, I suggest to dad over an iffy cell signal. I’ll bring work with me, but I’ll schedule some time off, too, so we can catch up. Yes, he agrees, this sounds good. And so I make the ambitious trip solo, except for my canine passenger in the back seat.

It has been four years since I’ve seen my dad in the flesh, since a pandemic and a major move (mine and The Chef’s) have upended our lives.

So it is Monday morning and I awake a little before dad and go downstairs to fire up the Keurig he showed me the night before. He has generously offered me some of his Maxwell House drip, but instead I undo a package of the pods I’ve brought with me, coffee that grows hair on your chest, I tell him, and fish around in the kitchen cabinets for a mug; I choose the one that says, Coffee Before Talkie. I’m plenty happy to talkie before coffee, but Scoutie is the only one there to listen, so our conversation is a bit one-sided. Dad emerges later wearing a white undershirt and plaid PJs and a bathrobe and fixes a bowl of Cheerios, asks if I want some. I offer to make him a frittata on toast instead, which is what I’m having. No thanks, he’ll stick with Cheerios and then again offers me some together with the other half of the banana he is slicing on top of it. We talk a little about whether it’s a good idea to eat spotty bananas. He tells me he is a creature of habit; he is somewhat adorable.

Dad shuffles more than walks at this advanced chapter in his life, but he navigates the tricky stair steps in his home, that turn sharply halfway up, like nobody’s business. I’m not worried yet. He has stood a little askew since surgery for a herniated lumbar disc back in the ’70s; it is probably the disc and not the surgery that left him that way. As time has worn on, this physical quirk has grown ever so slightly more pronounced. He has also shrunk a little. But it is the pain he’s struggled with in the intervening decades that is the most bothersome, better in recent months than it has been. I wish all the pain could just go away, vaporize.

His and mine. He asks if I’m okay every time I wince, as I do from time to time. Yes, it is fleeting I explain. The consequence of ruthless Russian training in my earliest years studying classical ballet in Memphis. That and my long-distance running, most likely. He gently suggests I might have arthritis. Yes, I do, I tell him. It is well documented and impressively advanced in some of my joints, for my age anyway. I explain the meniscus in each hypermobile knee has been reduced to Swiss cheese, and sometimes it shifts around; the pain is scorching for an instant and then gone. I also have emerging pain in my wrists and fingers, no doubt tied to my work life as an editor.

I suppose we are a pair of hurtin’ cowpokes. But I introduce him to the preparation known as Arnica Montana, fantastic for joint inflammation I tell him, and later on he’ll appear after errands with a pharmacy sack and hand me a fresh tube of it since mine’s almost out. He tries it too, but remains unconvinced it does anything.

Scout and Finn

Scout-the-Goldapeake-Retriever is ecstatic to come with me after last time, a few weeks ago when The Chef and I packed our bags and then headed up to New England without him. This time because of Chef David’s work obligations, the road trip will be mine alone to make with my senior doggie companion. Scout is a champ, when it comes to travel. I had exactly zero concerns about that, only a slight concern about the weight, size, and temperament differences between Scout and Finn, dad and Sheryl’s doggie.

Finn is a Shih-Tzu / Lhasa Apso mix, a fluffy little guy with a white and caramel coat, roughly the same age as Scout. But he is tiny by comparison, practically weightless to me, so little he has exactly no trouble darting at speed across the living room under the coffee table, clearing it effortlessly. Finn spends a fair amount of time in dad’s lap in the recliner. Other times he curls up in his little bed or fusses with his blanket. But when he is active, he’s a dervish who moves as a blur.

The introduction goes off without a hitch as predicted. Once the initial clamor dies down, Finn asks Scout what he’d like to do. Speaking as Finn, dad offers Scout several choices, including napping, watching telly, and snacking. Scout says meh, whatever y’all want to do, because he knows how to go with the flow. They learn to work as a team, Scout and Finn, when either of them spots a passerby through the glass storm door or front window. Finn knows the interloper will most likely soon reappear on the other side of the house and scurries over to another prime viewing window, there to sound the alarm again: Off with your head, miscreant! Soon he realizes Scout’s throaty growl saves him a step and instead darts instantly to the other window to lie in wait. Along with the napping, snacking, and binge watching, this fairly describes their week together. Finn is a generous and charitable host, and Scout is intuitive about Finn’s size and treads softly around him.

Families Are Complicated

Dad and I settle into a groove during the work week. I’ve brought some healthy ingredients with me, procured the balance of them down the road at the Publix, and plan to cook dinner each night. I unfurl some plastic wrap and beseech him to smell the saffron threads I packed, explaining I pulled them out of a tin Chef David gave me at Christmas; I joke that they look a little like contraband and hope I don’t get pulled over and searched, because then I’ll have to explain the suspicious-looking stringy orange substance to the cops.

Dad inhales and tells me it smells interesting; he has a terrible poker face. One night I prepare a pork and vegetable stir fry served with saffron rice; another I bake ginger-marmalade chicken and serve it with baby red potatoes. A couple of nights during my visit I bake frozen organic pizza margherita I found at the store, and make spinach salad as an accompaniment. I learn he dislikes broccoli but loves asparagus; I wish I’d known that before I shopped, I chide him. He is polite, but happiest when he brings home barbecue for us one night and Mexican another, when my sister-in-law pops in for an impromptu visit; he agrees the pizza is good with some of the leftover barbecue pork on it.

He offers me key lime pie and vanilla ice cream and pouts when I tell him maybe later, or I don’t take a portion that seems like enough to his way of thinking. He asks me to rate the pie, which comes from the barbecue place, and I give it a 9 out of 10. It really is that good, and so is the barbecue—good enough I ask him to take me back to the place so I can bring home The Chef a bottle of their house-made sauce. We’ll wind up eating key lime pie more than once during my visit.

In the afternoons around 3:30 or so, he grows a little antsy and grumpy and asks when my workday will end; soon, I tell him, and it does, because I’m typically logged in and working by 7:00 or earlier. He says he can’t believe I sit in front of a screen for all those hours. After I log off, we take the dogs out to the front porch and sit there for a while and talk; the weather is mercifully pleasant for much of the week. Dad tells stories about his coworkers, people I remember from childhood, most of whom are gone now. A heart attack, Alzheimer’s, cancer: the usual suspects. We talk about how some of them were heavy drinkers, and that is a surprise to me about one of them in particular. He tells me some about his business travels and one remarkable event that unfolded on a golf course down in Biloxi, to do with an alligator sunning itself on the 18^th hole and an especially bad decision a colleague made (all the guy lost was a pair of golf shoes, fortunately).

He is impressed I can remember some details going way, way back. Our conversation on one afternoon wanders into stories about family members, and dad begins to speak openly about his mother, who was complicated and behaved in a way that made life difficult for everyone around her, going back to her childhood, turns out. I admit aloud she intimidated me when I was very young. He tells me stories I’d never known, and I share a memorable one from my own early childhood and he has no recollection of it at all. He also tells me about the events surrounding the death of my maternal grandmother, and the two families coming together for her funeral. There is poignancy and sadness in his telling of these stories, and I know it is hard for him to tell them, but I hope it is cathartic. Hearing some for the first time is an epiphany, but a feeling descends over me that it’s important for us to sit there and talk and listen to each other.

There Are Always Dad Gifts

Dad always has something for me, artifacts that belonged to him or his parents or grandparents. On this visit he fishes out his class ring from the University of Tennessee, still in its original box, and asks if I want it. Yes, of course I do. It was a graduation gift from my maternal grandmother, his mother-in-law, another surprise to me. Seems class rings were costly even in 1966. I was already four by the time dad graduated from college, right ahead of our move to Memphis from Knoxville. He shows me a little nick in the faceted gemstone and explains it happened one afternoon at work when he was “out in the plant.” Dad’s career spanned decades, most of them working for a Proctor & Gamble subsidiary called Buckeye Cellulose, as a cotton linter buyer. Suffice it to say, he knows a lot about cotton and every single thing manufactured with every single part of the cotton plant, not least of all the linters—the fuzzy little hairs left behind after the bowl is plucked away from the seed. It made excellent fodder for show and tell or career day at school. Dad was happy to do these not only for me when I was in elementary school, but again for my own kiddo three decades later. Anything you want to know about cotton, dad’s your man.

To the ring, he adds an exquisite celluloid manicure set that belonged to my grandmother (the difficult one) and asks if I want that. Yes, please. It is a relic but still in remarkably good shape. And my granddaddy German’s military identification card. And a notebook filled with health-themed alphabet poetry dad made in grammar school, which is what they used to call it back in the day. Also a high school graduation photo of me inside a tri-fold album that included a copy of my graduation invitation, which he beseeched me to give to my husband. Dad loves to send unfortunate childhood pictures of me to The Chef, and this photo is no less so. But mainly, he is a treasure trove of fantastic artifacts and has handed them off to me and my brother over the years in bits and pieces.

Dad Has a Soft Spot for Animals

He leaves out peanuts and fresh water for the squirrels and chipmunks (“well I don’t like being thirsty,” he tells me) and diligently keeps a hummingbird feeder The Chef and I sent him a couple Christmases ago stocked with fresh nectar. There have been no hummingbirds yet this spring, ’til my arrival, he tells me, and then we catch a fleeting glimpse of a couple of them but none willing to stop and say hey just yet.

Dad complains nonstop about how Finn is a pain in the behind, how he won’t jump up into his lap or onto the front porch chair anymore and instead insists on being picked up. And how on occasion he darts off the front porch even though it’s against the rules, to go investigate a neighbor dog or to run down a squirrel. I gingerly suggest it is not Finn’s fault. Dad still protests and complains.

But one evening after we’ve finished supper and settled down with a little ice cream to watch the telly, I glance over at the recliner where he is holding court about something, just in time to see him dip the wrong end of the spoon into his ice cream and then feed it to Finn. And it goes on like so: He takes a spoonful for himself, and then gives Finn a tiny spoon-end-ful, repeatedly until the ice cream is finished. He keeps water in a glass on the little table next to him, and offers some of it to Finn, who drinks it right from the glass. Despite his bluster, dad is soft when it comes to animals.

Tempus Fugit

Our week goes by lightning fast. I introduce dad to the Great British Bake Off and he does not care for it much, I don’t think, but when I point out the new season of Junior Bake Off on the little Netflix tiles, he says yes, let’s try that and in short order is drawn to it like a magnet, and so it becomes our pastime each night until we start to nod off. We have lots of conversations layered right on top of the show, and when I later re-watch the series with The Chef, I realize I’d missed a bunch the first time around. Dad and I had a lot to talk about, seems, and even a single week wasn’t sufficient for all of it—we never even got around to The Beatles or to Paul McCartney, possibly our two favorite things in the world to talk about. But I feel somewhat accomplished to have introduced him to the notions of fondant icing, choux pastry, and the reducing of sugar in a saucepan to make caramel, even if he screws up his face at my saffron threads. He marvels at how mere children can know so much about baking, but believes making a nine-year-old compete with a fifteen-year-old is downright unjust.

Our lives have gone by lightning fast, too, and where is the justice in that.

Happy Father’s Day, dad. I love you “way back in the back.”